Patch Tuesday: There is More here than Meets the Eye

At first glance, June’s Microsoft Patch Tuesday looks pretty light, with only one critical issue but there is more here than meets the eye.

We have grown to expect IE updates every month, but MS13-047 is petty big with 19 CVEs. It’s just a matter of time before one of these get exploited.

It is interesting that about half these vulnerabilities were reported by Google. Google recently announced their seven day vulnerability notice program, and they certainly appear to be doing a good bit of security research.

Two other bulletins stand out this month: The first is MS13-049, a vulnerability in Windows networking that effects Windows desktop and server operating systems from Vista to Windows 8 and Server2008 to Server 2012.

This is a denial of service condition, and once inflicted the system will need to be rebooted or the network stack has to be restarted. It’s surprising that newer versions of Windows are more susceptible to this bug than the older versions.

On Windows Vista, Server 2008, Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 this is only a local vulnerability, but on new platforms like Windows 8 and Server 2012 this bug can be exploited across the network, proving that newer is not always better.

It takes thousands of packets to trigger this vulnerability because Windows must get into Synflood detection mode. Once this happens various layers of network and security infrastructure should detect and block the attack before it becomes a problem.

However, in the age of distributed denial of service attacks, this could still be a concern for some users.

The Office 2003 bug bulletin (MS12-051) is being exploited in the wild in targeted attack scenarios. This bug probably affects relatively few users since Windows 2003 is pretty old, but Office for Mac 2011 is also affected.

I guess Mac is the ‘redheaded stepchild’ of the Windows Office product family.